Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase

[JustinStupid]

I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)?

Any other tips?

EX:

http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html

OR

http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html

[john4math]

Are you serving the same page for both /MBA and /mba?  You should set up a 301 redirect from one to the other.

In Analytics, you can set a custom filter to make your URLs case insensitive, but I don't believe that'll fix the data currently in your account, it'll only fix them going forward.  That process is outlined here: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=90397.

My URLs are all lowercased so I can't actually find an example in my account to test, but when I do an advenced filter and select Include Page with the match type of "Matching RegExp" and try URLs with uppercase characters, Analytics appears to be making the query case insensitive.  So you can try that as well.

If the prior paragraph didn't work for you, you can do this on a URL by URL basis, by doing an advanced search by regular expression and substituting in "[M|m][B|b][A|a]" for "mba".

[Darden]

John and Team,

Suppose I have a site with 8000 pages and a small percentage of them in google analytics are showing up twice because the pages are linked through upper and lowercase links.  So in Google analytics (GA) there would be two rows:

http:///www.blah.com/MBA

http://www.blah.com/mba

Is there a type of query I can run in GA to allow me to find all pages where the url is the same except for the upper and lower casing?  I want to go into GA at Standard Reporting -> Content -> all pages and do an advanced search.

[Thos003]

Is the Short Title a redirect or the actual URL? If it's a redirect then it shouldn't be a problem. You can also use canonical if you want to use the lowercase and host the other page. But that's is a sloppy solution.

[ezclickmedia]

I agree with this completely. Lowercase with hyphens is my preference. Some E-commerce  companies (let's use Volusion as an example), give you the choice to use hyphens or underscores in a product's URL. This is nice and they even offer you the ability to write what the URL will be under the "Short TItle" option. However, this "Short Title" option is what will show in your URL AND the link text for a "Related Product" listing on the site. So if I want the link text to look normal when someone sees a Related Product link, I have to capitalize the text I put for the "Short Title" which will then cause the URL to be in Caps as well. This is a pretty significant flaw in their system and I have alerted them to the problem numerous times. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon.

[Thos003]

I agree. Lowercase in the example above. For ease of direct typing.

But when advertising just a website URL in print offline, caps. www.BulwarkPestControl.com is easier to read than www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com.

[sprynewmedia]

The fact a Caps create a 404 error on LAMP site is a pet peeve of mine - so is the fact Google thinks mix cases on IIS are separate (thus duplicate) URLs.

Too arbitrary to be picky about and cause user frustration.

Thanks goodness at lease DoMaInS can be what ever.

[john4math]

I like lowercase because when I type URLs by hand, I don't think to capitalize things.  If you capitalize things, you have to get the casing right to make the URL valid (unless you're setting up all sorts of fancy redirects), otherwise you a 404 and are left scratching your head.  Also, I agree with Dan that it looks better.

Hyphens vs. underscores is a classic question; Matt Cutts says to go with hyphens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k.  I like that better too.

[evolvingSEO]

Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan